Website Update April 2022

By Kodiak

By now I presume most of you still checking this blog out from time to time have probably given up on Parallaxian due to my prolonged radio silence.

However, the truth is, the game's development has been ongoing since last autumn.

The incommunicado issue has been the result of the following factors:

• The catastrophic loss of my main laptop in early October 2021, resulting in very limited ability to update my website (and the loss of many months' worth of Parallaxian backups).
• A torrent of behind-the-scenes difficulties related to my efforts to return to my native UK after a long period of living on the continent.
• A succession of extremely frustrating technical problems caused by my webhosting provider.

Thankfully, I have been able to review and update the website in the past few weeks, removing some old articles, adding new content and replacing lost or damaged images, and am now at the point where I can resume posting on it.

So, with that lengthy preamble out of the way, let's summarise and then review the major changes:

1. The newsletter has been terminated.
2. The pathetic t-shirt experiment has been cancelled.
3. The "Hot in the C64 scene" section has been replaced with direct links to my YouTube channel's videos.

No more Newsletter?

Yes. Because, to be frank, it was a monumental waste of time.

Did it expand my mailing list? Sure, but 10 new subscribers for a week or two of hard graft in writing each newsletter is not exactly worth the bother.

It also was proving too much of a diversion from actually coding Parallaxian, so it had to go.

Online shop gone too?

Everyone and their mama is trying to sell print-on-demand t-shirts these days, so my "online shop" was somewhat doomed to failure from the start.

When you consider all the hours entailed in putting designs together, designing the shop interface, etc., and all for just a single sale (if I am remembering correctly!), then again it's another diversionary / fruitless dead-end.

And C64 scene news axed?

Well, the idea of having scene news in the first place was to make an effort at generating daily traffic to my home page.

However, it didn't quite work out that way, as analytics revealed traffic only went up with each new blog post and then trailed off again to a pitiful low.

The proverbial "spike of hope" followed by the "flatline of nope"!!!

So once more, I had to wield the axe and use the screen real estate allocated to that feature to promote my YouTube channel, which to date is the most effective means of generating interest in the project.

Closing Thoughts

I have to say, the results from the site's relaunch in late 2020 surprised me; sure, my expectation levels were low from the outset, but the indifference to it from the scene was even worse than my projected worst case scenario had predicted!

For example, almost nobody used the Amazon affiliation feature, but in fairness, it's an overdone thing anyway and people are presumably tired of seeing it on websites and so just ignore it.

On the positive side, the PayPal donate feature fared slightly better and is being retained for now.

In any case, my focus now is on finishing Parallaxian, with or without support from the scene.

As for Deep Winter, it's unlikely to proceed unless Parallaxian does well, so its fate hangs in the balance.

In closing then, I hope you might have learned something about what not to do in terms of promoting / trying to monetise what is, let's face it, a website for a small niche.

And, of course, I would ask you to consider donating via Paypal using the PayPal button at the bottom of this page (in the orange "box-out"). towards Parallaxian's continuing development - see the orange box below for special perks for those who do so.

____


If you value my work and want to support me, a small donation via PayPal would be nice (and thanks if you do!)